121–130 of 606 posts
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I think what you are trying to say is that the average American is absurdly poor.
It doesn't look like that from outside America.
American households have a good amount of discretionary spending, but for the ticket items that actually matter such as quality housing, healthy food and healthcare my money stretches a lot further in Western Europe, for median household income that is.
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The 2008 stock market crash famously reduced inequality. Definitely didn't increase inequality by leaving the average person (via government bailouts) holding the bag.
The 2008 crash was also famously centred around mortgages, rather than pure stocks
Meanwhile, the insiders who knew what was going on (that the packaged mortgages were super high risk) insured their risk through new financial products - specifically 'credit default swaps' marked by AIG. The gimmick there was that AIG designed the swaps in a way that avoided insurance reserve regulations - and thus AIG had no money set aside in the event of default.
So when the shit hit the fan taxpayers coughed up close to 200 billion dollars to cover the 'swaps' sold by AIG that were backed by ... nothing.
A fair number of billionaires rose out of the ashes of those shenanigans. None were ever charged. That's how 'capitalism' works in the gold old USA. Always has. Always will.
I was very surprised by the holiday budget. Less than 2500$ for 80% of the population? Does that mean that no one from these 80% stays in a Hotel or AirBnB for longer than a week with their family? No one travels overseas, or if so, only every 5 years or so? 2000$ is what you can easily spend on plane tickets for a family of 4.
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The 2008 stock market crash famously reduced inequality. Definitely didn't increase inequality by leaving the average person (via government bailouts) holding the bag.
In fairness; there is an ongoing strategy of printing money and distributing it to asset owners. That may also be contributing to asset owners accounting for most spending.
Not realizing what had happened, in three years I went from "almost enough to buy a house in the city in cash" to "have to buy vacant rural wasteland then develop it myself from scratch."
The latter worked out, but cost me two years of my life of hard labor. Those two years of manual labor more or less represent what home owners took from non owners via the central bank.
The problem can be solved with transition to communism. No one will own anything and there will be no wealth.
Sincere question about communism: Let's say hypothetically that the distribution of stock ownership was more even across the population, and variance was largely (but not completely) due to length of time in the workforce. And further, that the stock owned by workers is a large enough block that they effectively have controlling shares at many companies. Maybe I'm talking about a different universe, but please imagin…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voucher_privatization
The thing is, it began like you described - but most people didnt see the value in it and sold it immediately; thats the reason why you have some oligarch caste, as this mainly got fueled by this process (sure, not the only source of their wealth but the understood back then how to play the game)
Top 10% is actually a lot of people! Wealth equality is not really a goal, it better to ask if the bottom 50% got wealthier in absolute terms, which the author answers in another post: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2024/06/the-bottom-50/
Capitalism only efficiently allocates resources if the market value of a good or service closely approximatatoon its "true" value to society. And that ceases to be the case when wealth is very unevenly spread.
I think about this from time to time and I suppose everything is cyclical in the end. Most of us would have been some peasant in the feudal age and when it gets really bad it always ends in a revolution of some sort. It's just on a global scale and timeframe now. As more of the population feels the effects of inequality they won't appeased by just fancy toys and shiny things, they will want change by force. My only s…
The population might not be happy, but they don't have the means to change it. Revolutions don't happen when people are mad, they happen when the ones who can afford armies and equipment sense the possibility of coming out on top. 250 years ago George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War out of his own pocket and he still would have retained two thirds of his wealth. Instead he put the losses o…
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It makes the rich poorer but keeps the poor in the same place.
Not really. Stock value is just paper. Stocks going down just means they are valued less now relative to other stuff. Imagine if everyones socks were suddenly valued a million bucks, except yours. Would you "stay in the same place" or would you suddenly be too poor to afford to buy the labor of all the newly minted millionaires? I'd bet on the latter.
I was very surprised by the holiday budget. Less than 2500$ for 80% of the population? Does that mean that no one from these 80% stays in a Hotel or AirBnB for longer than a week with their family? No one travels overseas, or if so, only every 5 years or so? 2000$ is what you can easily spend on plane tickets for a family of 4.